Grains, edible oils, utensils, fuels,aromatics, printing, moneylending, cinema,ship chandling etc.etc, a whole hodgepodge of seemingly unrelated businesses of the PSTS, PSTP, PSTC family meant I always knew it was possible for people to be simultaneously present and successful in widely divergent businesses.I also knew that if I listened carefully enough to the insiders,I’d understand the method behind what to outsiders looks like madness in these ventures.Ask me too how PSTS,PSTP&PSTC became shadows of themselves,and I have my views.Unfortunately such study is only good enough to tell me what not to do,what to guard against or insure.And all brakes is no good when you are setting out to build.What I really need in my position today are insights into the habits of P,S &T to which I could attribute their success.And to figure that out,I have nothing more than a few old papers and familylore affected by a few generations of retellings to rely on.And perhaps rely a bit on my gut instincts bred by the DNA we share.

So as luck would have it,when I heard of the story of another family of three brothers,in another small town,in another far corner of the country, that in contemporary times rose from grain to become the largest producers of marble in the world and then went on to set up a state of the art cement manufacturing unit in collaboration with ThyssenKrupp and Pfeiffer with the aim to become the foremost name in premium cement in the country and was now venturing into housing finance ,I simply had to attend the Wonder Home Finance launch event in Jaipur on Aug1 and try to learn as much as I could by keeping my eyes and ears open. Read more of this post

Swaminathan S A Aiyar is always well worth listening to,This piece by him is superlative and well worth reading,Do pass it around.There are too many people pretending that everything is fine or will be so in the near future.Unless we accept that there is a problem and a serious one,we are unlikely to go looking for solutions.

Make no mistake, a second Asian Financial Crisis is on its way. This storm will not blow over soon. It originated in the US, when the Fed proposed to taper and end quantitative easing. The frightening thing is that this will happen in stages over the next 12-18 months, and each turn of the liquidity screw can cause a fresh financial storm. Nothing Chidambaram or Raghuram Rajan say can avert the storm.

Learning from the 1997-99 experience, all Asian countries (including India) have built up large forex reserves, reduced leverage compared with 1997, and shifted to floating exchange rates. This makes them far more resilient, so they should not collapse as in 1997-99. But they will suffer severe damage regardless. Depreciation raises the price of all items that can be exported or imported. Estimates differ, but a 10% depreciation probably sucks out 1-1.2% of purchasing power through inflation. At . 68 to the dollar, currency depreciation is around 25% since May, implying a loss of purchasing power of 2.5-3% of GDP. That is hugely recessionary. It will be reflected in much higher prices of petroleum products, fertilisers, most commodities, and knock-on transport and material costs. Read more of this post